Damned_colonel (who found it via unusualmusic) posted an article about piracy over on DW. It starts with an alternative view on pirate history, and then talks specifically about  Somalia, which seems to have caught the media's attention at the moment:

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should ( Read more... )

Racism storm as store bans 'coloureds'

Licensee directs staff to stop groups of 'coloureds' entering NSW Liquor Stax storeIn brief: liquor store manager writes memo banning Aboriginal Australians; one employee resigns in disgust; other employees discuss memo at meeting, and new policy is dropped; memo leaked to press; manager formally apologises ( Read more... )

From this week's issue of The Black Commentator -

http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html

Senator Hillary Clinton Must Explain
The Praising of a Group of KKK Supporters

A BlackCommentator.com Investigative Report
By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
and Peter Gamble, BlackCommentator.com Publisher

Note: ( Read more... )

Painfully ironic title of the entire piece aside, look at the praise being lavished on SMister Pitt:

15 People Who Make America Great - The Giving Back Awards
Brad Pitt

( If it wasn't for Brad Pitt, most Americans would never have heard of Namibia. They might not know about AIDS orphans in South Africa, or the plight of children in Haiti, or what transpired at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Pitt, 42, has been a movie star for 15 years-and a paparazzi target for nearly as long. Celebrity mags have made millions reporting on his love life, and the obsession only intensified when he began romancing Angelina Jolie. So he started fighting back-but not by punching photographers. If paparazzi were going to follow the couple everywhere, Pitt figured they might as well drag them somewhere that desperately needed the world's attention. )

for those of us who live in the US it would seem this is an issue of national news. for me, a Michigan resident, and a former "thumb" (Michigan is shaped like a mitten, so there's a thumb) area resident, it's a local clusterf*ck of alarmist "news" with an unexpected (or at least inexplicable) anti-Muslim twist.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? ( Read more... )

*please excuse crossposting ( Read more... )

Indian communities are flooded with people who want to know more about them-New Agers looking for quick spiritual enlightenment, anthropologists eager to capture "an authentic culture thought to be rapidly and inevitably disappearing,"2 and Christians eager to engage in interreligious dialogue. How one evaluates these attempts to understand and " ( Read more... )

nagged from my friend's list.

Brendan O’Neill
Brad, Angelina and the rise of 'celebrity colonialism'
What gives two Hollywood actors the right to shut down an African nation so that they can have a special experience?Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in ( Read more... )

An Opposition Party Minus the Opposition
In his speech, Bush outlined an immigration reform plan that, in his own words, walks a "middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant, and a program of mass deportation."

It is indeed a middle ground.  On one side is the ultra-xenophobic right wing of his own ( Read more... )

I haven't heard of this before, but the article refers to it as though it's well known.

The Katrine Effect

Seems pretty idiotic.